KEY POINTS:
You could call what music-animation duo Colliderscope do "live cinema". Or, laughs singer, musician and beat maker Fiona Soe Paing, another description would be "deconstructive karaoke".
"With me singing live, with the visuals, that's what you do in karaoke isn't it?" she laughs again.
To be fair, Colliderscope's
show, No Man's Land, which Soe Paing and animation artist Zennor Alexander will perform as part of Auckland Fringe at the Basement on March 8 and 15, is far more stylish, elegant, and sinister than your average karaoke joint.
The idea for the show comes from Soe Paing's mixed-race background of Scottish and Burmese descent. "It stemmed from the idea of not having a culture around me because obviously I didn't have the Burmese background growing up in Scotland and it explores the ideas around that - of culture and identity. That no man's land - the place in between places - resonated with me," she says.
Colliderscope blurs more than just cultural boundaries with her mix of obscure electronica, minimal beats, and exotic voice merging seamlessly with Alexander's animated visuals to evolve into a multi-media art work. "And these days it's so much easier to mix all those things up," says Alexander. "And the term live cinema is something that perhaps wasn't common five years ago so it is definitely a blurring of boundaries and genres."
Since the pair did their first show at the Waiheke Island cinema in the middle of last year, things have taken off with plans to release their DVD album No Man's Land in May.
A track like the spooky and mysterious Behrot is akin to Mezzanine-era Massive Attack, and strong melodies also come through in the music, too, which Soe Paing says probably comes from her Celtic heritage.
As well as singing in English and Burmese she has come up with an invented language - written down it looks like a cross between Sanskrit and Arabic - because she felt uncomfortable singing in a Scottish accent or "slipping so easily into an American pop [music] drawl". "I just thought I'll make something up and see what it sounds like, and originally the intention was to use them as dummy lyrics, but they ended up sounding good," she laughs.
And for Alexander, collecting vision is often just as random. The other day they recorded a Christian duo - "they looked like an Amish couple but it turned out they were from Australia" - doing hymns on the banjo.
"That's how we get a lot of ideas, from being playful," says Soe Paing.
"And exploring," adds Alexander.
Scott Kara